[Web-SIG] [Fwd: Summer of Code preparation]

[Ian Bicking]

Titus Brown wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 10:39:59AM -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
> -> Hi guys... looks like Google SoC is back on again.  I'm hoping we get 
> -> some good web stuff going on, so people should start thinking.  Also 
> -> there's two wiki pages where you can add project ideas: 
> -> http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode and the somewhat out-of-date 
> -> (and needs cleaning) page from last year: 
> -> http://wiki.python.org/moin/CodingProjectIdeas
> 
> I'm thinking of proposing a project to build a JavaScript interpreter
> interface for Python; the goal (for me) is to get twill/mechanize to
> understand JavaScript.  I think the project has wider applications,
> but I'm not sure what people actually want to do with JavaScript.
> I could imagine server-side parsing of javascript, and/or integration of 
> javascript and python code.  Thoughts?

Do you mean like integrating Mozilla's Spidermonkey with Python?  That 
would be a very approachable and useful project, I think.  It even gets 
us a restricted execution environment ;)

I'm personally non-plussed by deeper integration, like parsing 
Javascript in Python or otherwise mingling the runtimes.  But I know 
other people find the idea of that sort of thing much more appealing 
than I do.  Regardless of motivation, I think the simpler Spidermonkey 
integration would be more useful *and* much easier.  Definitely an 
interesting idea -- and the more I think about the restricted execution 
aspect, the more plausibly useful that sounds.  (Rich templating 
languages using Javascript?)

I think Brett Cannon is doing something specifically related to Python 
and Javascript for his doctorate, though what exactly that entails is a 
little less clear to me -- I think it's more related to Python in the 
browser, which is kind of the flip side of this.


-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org